Paula Constant - Slow Journey South: Walking To Africa, A Year in Footsteps

It is early morning, and we are swimming in the sea.

The wet season is coming, and the water is calm and bath warm, crystal clear with the neap tide. Over the tall, cold dunes there is only a pink rim hinting at the rising sun, and the morning air is comfortable before the burning heat of the coming day. It's our favourite time for dreaming. We float lazily, drifting in and out of each other's embrace, idly talking.

Gary's head breaks the surface as he comes up for air.

'I would like to do one last trip,' he says, treading water, feeling for the sea floor. 'I feel as if there's something still out there.'

I roll onto my stomach and follow the tide toward him.

'Do one last trip where?' I ask; we are currently living out of our backpacks in the town of Broome in far northwest Australia. In many ways we are still travelling.

'Well Europe. Africa...' he suggests, floating and looking up at the sky. 'Back overseas somewhere.'

We are both quiet and do not look at each other.

He knows I want this, have wanted it for a long time. We've spoken of it before, as a vague, tentative thing; but as the years passed I have begun to relinquish my hold on it, reluctant to invest in a maybe.

The wrong word from me now will end it forever, if I choose. Perhaps Broome is our big adventure, and it is time to take a 'real' job, time to settle. We own a house in Melbourne that we are letting. We know we will never go back, but we still don't know where we want to end up.

I know with a sudden certainty that this is the moment of decision; and wonder where it came from, how we got here without me noticing. The weight of the future hovers above us in the perfect morning stillness.

'If we are going to do this, then we are doing it properly,' I say slowly. 'No bullshit six-month backpacking trip.'

'No,' he agrees. The small line at the bridge of his nose wrinkles.

'I was thinking more like I don't know, a ' his hands move, speaking where his words do not.

'Lifestyle change.' I say it as a statement.

'A real chance to do what we want,' he says, hands now describing large, elegant designs in the air. 'To have a real go at the whole creative thing.' He speaks with consideration now. 'To give ourselves a proper chance.'

A chance at a different life. It is why we came to Broome in the first place.

'We haven't done it here, have we,' I say, and he shakes his head in agreement.

Broome has been wonderful, wild, beautiful, life-changing; but it has also been too comfortable. We have sunk into a kind of tropical stupor, rousing ourselves periodically to remind each other that we came up here for a reason, that we wanted to branch out in our creative lives and get out of the pattern of work and pay; but it is so easy to drift along, swimming in the morning and eating mangoes on the beach, that we have spent two years making vague plans with no results.

But now the wheel has turned another notch, and with a slight sadness I know that it will not retreat again.

'I love it here. I could live here forever,' Gary says in the determined way I have come to respect. 'But we need to make a choice either get organised here and do what we set out to, or go overseas and do it there.'

Now we are staring at each other in the water and the energy between us has become a rip tide, surging back and forth with palpable force.

'And we really could do it. We could go to Africa,' I say steadily. I watch him.

I have a thing for Africa, and he knows it. But this is the first time we have put it out there, as a proper proposal, as something we might actually do, and the word adds a potency to the rip tide.

'We are talking about a really big trip, here, aren't we,' he says. He is smiling now, breaking the tension, and then my arms are around his neck and we are swirling around in the quickening of the current. The day is coming and the first fingers of light are beginning to creep over the dunes.

'I reckon we should make it a huge trip,' I say, and now I am laughing and he is twirling me around in the water, faster and faster, 'a really big, fuck off, monster of a travel to end all travels the kind where we just keep on going, no matter what happens, or how broke we are.'

'Yes,' he says, the word a powerful exhalation, and I can almost see the excitement surging through him, 'so what are we talking? Europe? And Africa? The whole lot?' We twirl in the water, faster and faster, and the sun bursts into brilliant light over the dunes, drowning us in radiant heat.

'Let's do the lot,' I say.

* * *

I am possessed by the idea of our trip.

Day after day, in every spare moment, I trawl the internet. I scour the world beyond Broome for anything to do with trans-Europe, or trans-Africa, travel, while outside the window of our small home the thunderheads of the wet build up, purple and fierce, lit from behind with the strange electrical flashes that precede the rains. I find site after site for tour companies; but we are determined not to do a traditional tour, or the ubiquitous six-month overland truck ride through Africa.

Finally I find a site called Africa Overland. It's aimed at people who want to drive through Africa, and contains links to the sites of people who have already done so.

I am hooked. I spend days reading one travel blog after another. Through them I travel the desert of the Sahara, changing tyres bogged in sand; traverse the muddy roads of the Congo, battling insects and malaria; and camp on vast savannah plains in burning sunsets. I am enthralled by the minutiae of rooftop tents and dual fuel tanks, and become an armchair expert on four-wheel drive restoration.